An introduction to your sidebar positions

This theme packs a lot of sidebar positions; currently at 39 sidebars in total. Influential Lite does not have all of them activated, so the purpose of this introduction is to show you how the sidebars work in this theme. To show you a layout of theme sidebars, you can visit the demo site:

The live site does not show all of them, with respect to the WooCommerce and the landing page sidebar groups.

Inactive Sidebars

When you first activate the theme, the following sidebars will “not” be loaded because not everyone will need them.

WooCommerce Sidebars

Landing Page Sidebars

The landing page is a unique template because it contains 12 sidebars (24 on the premium version) that you can activate each section individually. For the lite version of this theme, you get 3 sections (6 for the premium) in the landing page, each with 4 side-by-side sidebars. If you only need section 1 and 2, you can activate these two sections, which in turn, will show the available sidebars when you go to the “Widgets” area of your dashboard. When active, you will see them like this:

The reason why I make these sidebars inactive, is because not everyone will use WooCommerce or the landing page, so why clutter up the Widget admin are with sidebars that will never be used?

Dynamic Width Sidebars

With regards to the groups of sidebars, the ones that give you up to 4 side-by-side, you get dynamic width. This means they will self-adjust their width based on how many sidebars have widgets published to them. For example:

1 widget = 100% in width

2 widgets = 50% each

3 widgets = 33% each

4 widgets = 25% each

It’s surprising to find that many themes today have fixed widths. This means that if you have 4 sidebars side-by-side with 3 widgets published, you will end up with the 4th sidebar empty and showing as an empty space in your page. This is why dynamic width widgets work best because they will fill that empty space, giving you a far better looking page that is consistent.

Can I Move My Sidebars or Add More?

I’ve had this question a few times with other themes, but the short answer is no. However, if you are using a child theme, you can modify a theme template by moving the sidebar code to the new location you want it to show in.

As for adding more sidebars, you can do that, but again, this means modifying the code. However, I will be honest in saying that doing this will be a much larger and more complicated job if you’ve never done this before. You would have to modify multiple files and work with HTML, CSS, and PHP code.

WARNING Only attempt this if you are comfortable enough opening and modifying code in theme files, and do it only in a Child Theme.